The View From Swamptown: Reflecting on the hard winters of times past in Southern Rhode Island

In this the age of climate change and bizarre weather patterns that defy prediction or even logic for that matter, it makes sense to pause and contemplate old man winter’s potential. Likewise, as the roller coaster that is southern New England weather careens through fall on its way to another uncertain winter, it’s appropriate to reflect upon winters of times past.

The series of brutally cold winters throughout the last half of the 1890s is a prime example. Each one seemed colder and more unrelenting than the last.

A photo, taken in 1897, shows just how hard the Narragansett Bay froze up that year. The image shows the old Wickford Harbor Lighthouse, constructed some 15 years earlier in 1882 on Old Gay Rock some 300 yards from the shoreline of Poplar Point, surrounded by local folks who walked out there to take a gander at the 52-foot-tall Victorian structure.

Diary entries and newspaper accounts during those winters tell the tales of horseback riding on the frozen bay and thrilling sleigh rides from South County to Jamestown nearly half a century prior to the construction of the Jamestown Bridge. Ferry boats and passenger steamers, important transportation components in an age before “a car in every driveway” was the national norm, were iced in hard and fast at their various docks and berths up and down the coves and shorelines of Rhode Island. Water-borne commerce was at a standstill, and coal, the primary energy source for both home heating and the firing of the steam boilers that ran the vital textile industry here in South County, a commodity that was transported almost exclusively on the water, was in short supply.

These bone-chilling, mind-numbing winters were hard times for every man, woman and child for all sorts of reasons; the only positive result that anyone could conjure up was that it sure was a whole lot easier for the children of the many lighthouse keepers on Narragansett Bay to get ashore each day to attend school. And this “cold stretch” in the 1890s was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Many decades earlier, members of the prominent Allen family of South County took advantage of another hard freeze on Narragansett Bay to relocate an ancestral home off of Prudence Island to a mainland location.

So, global warming or no global warming, if the winters of the late 1890s weren’t the first and only example of the wrath of the New England weather gods, well they won’t be the last. So stock up on warm sweaters, firewood, coal and hot cocoa and get ready to settle in and hunker down – Old Man Winter is rubbing his icy hands together, stomping his chilly feet, and getting ready to lay into us once again.

If this image interests you, then please join me this Saturday at the “Christmas at the Castle” celebration at Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown from noon to 4 p.m. I will be doing a reading and book signing of my young readers historical fiction book “The Day the Bay Froze,” which is set during one of these very winters. This book, illustrated by local artist, University of Rhode Island professor emeritus and Wickford Art Association member Dan Urish, is a lively adventure set here in South County and based in local history. Also with me at this event will be Martha Smith, a retired journalist whose work has graced just about every publication in Rhode Island, who will be signing her true story book “Me & Mr. Zane Grey,” a delightful tale focused on the rescue of an elderly donkey and how this fine little steed positively affected all he came in contact with. Martha’s book features photos from The Independent’s own Paul J. Spetrini. I hope I see you all on Saturday.

The author is the North Kingstown town historian. The views expressed here are his own.